Ipfs Hosting videos, lifetime ? price?

good morning, everyone,

first of all I would like to apologize for the quality of linguistic expression, i’m French, I don’t speak English very well.

I’m currently working on a video hosting project, weighing between 300 and 400go in total (for a total of 1000-1200 video files) and I’d like to host them on ipfs, that’s why I’d like to ask you for some information.

First of all, is there a life time for the accessibility of the files? For example, will the files/videos be deleted after 3 months?
Secondly, does hosting on ipfs have a price?

And finally, the goal of hosting my videos (mp4/avi) here would be to be able to hang them on my website and that people can see them directly, without necessarily downloading them. Is this use adequate to what ipfs offers?

I thank you sincerely for the information you will be able to give me.
Have a nice day
Althalos

IPFS nodes are free to use, and as such there is no cost for storing data on your IPFS nodes. Furthermore if you store data on your ipfs nodes, they will be around until you unpin them and run garbage collection on your nodes.

You can use a “pinning service” to store your data on other IPFS nodes, and not have to deal with managing your own nodes For this however the cost will vary depending on what the pinning service charges. Most pinning services charge $0.14/gb -> $0.15/gb to store your data in one location.

My startup runs a service called Temporal that charges $0.05gb/$0.07gb to store your data in two different regions, on three different IPFS nodes, and in terms of cost its the cheapest IPFS service on the market. https://play2.temporal.cloud for the service or https://temporal.cloud for general information.

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Hallo! I do not know how much it would cost, but I can answer some of your other questions.

There is no lifetime limit for hosting files on IPFS, but content will disappear from the network eventually. To keep content available you need to host it somewhere. (Like temporal.cloud as @postables mentioned.) This is similar to HTTP, but users can help you host the data. Hosting larger amounts of data certainly comes at a price.

And finally, the goal of hosting my videos (mp4/avi) here would be to be able to hang them on my website and that people can see them directly, without necessarily downloading them. Is this use adequate to what IPFS offers?

Since most users will not have an IPFS compatible browser you will need an HTTP gateway for this. You can use a public one like dweb.link or cf-cloudflare.com, but you need to limit your bandwidth use or they may blacklist your content.

If you have many users watching similar videos you could try having distributing the bandwidth between them using js-ipfs (the IPFS in-browser implementation). Starting videos will be slower (tens of seconds) if you use this however.

Well, I think you haven’t fully wrapped around the concept yet:

If you add content to your IPFS node, you make it accessible via IPFS, but you’re the only one providing the content to the network.

Everyone who accesses the files via IPFS will hold a copy of the data for a while, but that’s not guaranteed.

If you want to store files on IPFS permanently, you need a provider - like for regular web content too. There are specialized providers for IPFS which are called pinning services.

Pinata.cloud for example offers a free 1 GB tier and everything above needs to be paid for, by used space.

On the other hand you could just rent a regular server with enough harddrive space in a datacenter and store the files there.

If you want a recommendation for the second option, feel free ask me privately (since I don’t want to make publicly any advertising for a specific provider).

Pinata also charges you $0.15/gb for storing your data on one node, and an additional $0.15/gb to replicate your data. That is nowhere close to being affordable for anyone but a company well funded by VCs. Temporal costs 50%->60% less, stores your data on 3x the amount of nodes as pinata, and has 3GB of free data :slight_smile: To store the amount of data mentioned in OP on the same amount of nodes with Pinata as Temporal does would cost $135/month, vs the $45/month Temporal charges.
Not to mention all of Temporal is open-source, which means there’s no vendor lock-in like there is with Pinata.

Everything about Pinata is the antithesis of what IPFS stands for, which is self-hostable solutions and a distributed web accessible to all. Pinata is the worlds most expensive storage service, and the worlds most expensive IPFS service only accessible to those who are privileged enough to afford to massive charges.

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So what is the difference between Temporal and TemporalX? It’s confusing as hell that there seems to be some service offered at https://www.rtradetechnologies.com/home/#product-page and another at https://medium.com/temporal-cloud

Are those two different things or the same thing on two different sites?

I think I get it. Same product, two different sites. I guess what I don’t get is why Temporal, the hosting solution is opensource but the client, TemporalX, is proprietary?

Medium is a blog, not quite sure what gave the impression that its a service? It’s just where we post our blogs. As for the rtradetechnologies website is the website of the parent company.

As I linked to in my previous post https://play2.temporal.cloud/ is the service, https://github.com/RTradeLtd/Temporal is the repository for the service, https://temporal.cloud/ contains background information on both Temporal, TemporalX and the rest of the services/products we offer/develop.

TemporalX is a completely different service unrelated to Temporal. Temporal is in no way proprietary and is entirely open-source. To be honest I’m also not sure what gave the impression that TemporalX is related to Temporal. They’re under completely different product pages on the Temporal website so that should convey that they’re also separate products.

If there’s something thats confusing I’d be happy to look into making it less confusing, just its the first time someone has mixed up Temporal + TemporalX so I’m a bit confused as well lol

So you named two separate products Temporal and TempralX and are surprised that someone would think there is some sort of association? It’s confusing because the branding is completely different.

First time this has ever happened so yes it is surprising. The fact that the branding is different, and the fact that they’re named different (Temporal, TemporalX) to date has conveyed the impression that they’re different services, and different products.

Ok. Sounds like you’re doing a great job. Thanks for letting everyone know what it would be like interacting with your company. Best of luck to you and your endeavors.

There’s no need to be sarcastic, i was simply trying to explain/discuss, not sure why you’re putting malice thoughts in to what I said but to each their own.

@postables

I don’t know why my example of a pinning service triggered you so much :thinking:

Anyway - I don’t have any affiliation with Pinata and just gave an example where @Althalos could test out a pinning service. I don’t think that’s the right place for doing advertisements - please stop.

Not triggered at all. Just highlighting the fact that Pinata is the exact opposite of what IPFS stands for, it’s not open, nor is it accessible to all. It’s a price gouging service that takes advantage of simply offering IPFS storage to price gouge people. How is that respectable at all? They charge you for basic data protection services.

For the last year they literally had 0 redundant storage of IPFS data. It was simply one node hosting your data. It’s irresponsible for a storage service provider to carelessly handle people’s data like that. They’re solution to basic data redundancy measures was to price gouge people.

All prices like that do is serve to ensure that IPFS will never be adopted by the mainstream. How on earth is IPFS supposed to get adopted if it’s 10x the cost of traditional storage services? People get upset at AWS charging $0.01/gb for S3 storage, and then hammering you with bandwidth costs. You could store your entire datasets on S3 even with the bandwidth charges than what Pinata charges.

The only thing that does is make it harder for IPFS to be adopted by the mainstream.

Regardless, that’s waaaay off topic. :slight_smile:

Not really, its entirely on topic.

If you think that’s the right place for a philosophical discussion about a specific pinning service, you’re wrong. Open a new thread for this please.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. I was being quite serious and I don’t have magical powers and lack the ability to inject malice into anything. Perhaps you’re projecting.

I asked sincere questions about your product that provided you and opportunity to discuss and clarify your product and services. I didn’t confuse Temporal and TemporalX. I said that it was surprising that they didn’t have any relation to each other given the name similarity. Apple makes the iPhone and the iPhone X. They’re both phones, one is a little bigger. They’re related. The names are similar. Volkswagen doesn’t have a Passat and a Passat SEL where one is a car and the other is a toaster. Hopefully that makes things just a little clearer for you.